The Pencil Manifesto: Why Analog Tools Still Matter

I used to write about everything on the margins of textbooks, the back pages of notebooks, on scraps of paper and even sticky notes.

There was always a pen on me somewhere, and if there wasn't, I got anxious in a way I couldn't quite explain.

Then came the laptop, and then the phone. I started typing everything: notes, half-thoughts, things I wanted to remember. Somewhere in there, without noticing, I stopped writing.

Typing is clean and fast. It also made my thinking lazier.

Because the friction was the point. A pen is slow, and a thought has to slow down to be written. You have to sum it up before your hand will move.

There's no copy-paste in a notebook, and no autocomplete finishing your sentence before you have. It's just you and whatever you actually mean, and you have to work it out then and there.

There's research pointing the same way. In 2024, a team at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology recorded the brain activity of 36 students as they wrote by hand and typed. Handwriting showed more connected activity across the brain, including in areas tied to memory and learning. It was a small study, and the handwriting was done with a digital pen on a touchscreen, so I wouldn't stretch it too far. But it matched what I'd felt.

I came back to it slowly, and a little sheepishly. A notebook first, one of those unlined ones that feel slightly reckless. Then a pen I liked the weight of. Then, gradually, the mornings.

My handwriting is worse than it was at twenty-one. My thoughts still wander across the page at odd angles, and I still cross out more than I'd like.

But the crossings-out turned out to be the useful part. A typed note gives you the conclusion. A notebook keeps the whole route to it, wrong turns included, and that's what I'd been missing.

I wasn't writing before but was producing text. There's a difference, and the page reminded me.